Social Change and the Individual [antikvár]

ForewordKazuko tsurumi has reunited what psychology and sociology have torn asunderfeeling and thinking, child and man, man and society. She is concerned as much with the socialization of feeling as with the socialization of thought, with the socialization of the adult as with the socialization of the child, with the humanization of society by man as with the socialization of man by society. It is a complex lattice, mirroring the varying degrees of freedom of men in society, but with conceptual parsimony. Thus the same affects are the focus of both parent-child and adult socialization. The same structure which is used to describe a personality is used to describe a society. The same structure which is used to describe the organization of affects is used to describe the organization of ideologies. The same structure which is used to describe a personality or a society at one point in time is used to describe a personality or a society across time.Parsimony is not here purchased at the expense of theoretical power. Kazuko Tsurumi has seized upon that rarest of experimentsthe experiment in naturea society before and after a major transformation occasioned by a total military defeat. Such a radical change necessarily changes adult socialization. The earher parent-child socialization now creates conflict for the adult who had been socialized for a different society. So severe a mismatch as that between adult socialization in Japan after World War II and the parent-child socialization of those who grew up before the war is of course a rarity, but an extraordinarily illuminating one. The customary continuity between early and later socialization exaggerates the significance of early socialization both in fact and in the minds of theorists who were influenced by this very usual state of affairs. It has tended to produce an overestimate of the stability and rigidity of both men and societies and an underestimate of their potential for change. This experiment in nature is also of interest as a methodological strategy. Psychologists have in general been much possessed by the promise of the experimental method. Indeed, they have been willing and even eager to pay whatever price seemed necessary for the power and rigor which is presumed to be the consequence of manipulating and independently varying components of situations which might otherwise covary in such a way as to confound understanding. Because we are not able, nor willing, to treat